Experience
2021 — 2025
2021 — 2025
Pleasanton, California, United States
Led User Experience (UX) Operations to support a team of over 300 User Experience Designers, Researchers and Content Strategists for the largest HCM and payroll company globally with a focus on people, process and tools.
• Established a holistic process for all of UX with activity guides for different phases of the design process including intake acceptance, kick-off template, stakeholder review guide and cognitive walkthrough.
• Proposed and led the implementation of a consistent UX intake process and ticketing system for all UX requests to enable tracking of work, time on projects and better gathering of requirements for requests.
• Managed the complete reimagining of UX Research by replacing multiple disparate tools and building an AI powered tool stack that worked together seamlessly and reduced the time to conduct and develop research findings by over 50%.
• Developed and implemented a full on-boarding, off-boarding and cross-boarding process with documentation, checklists and templates for managers improving the experience for all new hires and employees changing roles.
• Managed the creation of a UX Resources site with information on all aspects related to UX including Design, Research, Content, Analytics, Accessibility, Artificial Intelligence (AI), ADP tools and products.
• Led the full transition from Sketch as the primary design tool to Figma with a comprehensive transition plan, training and up-skilling, community updates and development of a resource hub for employees.
2012 — 2020
Established a digital presence for a 170-year-old company by defining a holistic customer experience strategy and building a user experience team to design a global suite of digital products.
• Delivered the complete product design for Western Union’s transactional mobile applications, Web sites and Kiosks which are now available in over 200 countries and territories in 34 languages worldwide.
• Developed a global Design System including a style guide, pattern library, and UI kit to increase quality, time to market, reduce engineering resources and establish a consistent customer experience.
• Oversaw all phases of UX work including discovery, research, conceptual design, prototyping, detailed design, usability testing, and final implementation.
• Evangelized organizational culture of design to focus on the user needs and established product design methodology to reinforce the customer-first approach.
• From a product perspective, transformed Western Union’s digital products into category-leading consumer experiences to increase market share and the global brand footprint within the digital space.
• From an organizational perspective, recruited and built a team of world class user experience designers and specialists to support product requirements and improve the customer experience across all Western Union’s digital products in addition to designing innovative next-generation experiences that are 2-3 years out.
• Created products exceeding expectations and enabling the Western Union’s network of digital products to deploy innovative new ways to reach our customers, increasing transaction starts +5%, revenue +73% and Net Promoter Score +43% within the first year.
• Achieved and maintained digital transaction growth of +25% year over year since launch.
2011 — 2012
2011 — 2012
Managed interaction design, visual design, information architecture and end-to-end customer experience.
• Defined information architecture to ensure clear and straightforward paths for users to follow, identifying specific areas of friction that were streamlined using A/B testing with product partners, resulting in significantly increased conversion rates.
• Increased customer engagement and retention by proposing a gamification system that enabled users to earn points, gain levels and participate in events while earning rewards.
• As a proof of concept designed a loyalty program enabling local merchants to create campaigns to draw in new users and reward existing customers, from concept to launch in a single sprint.
• In addition to the user-facing product led design of business sites that included dashboards to monitor performance and effectiveness of merchant campaigns.
2005 — 2011
My primary role at eBay was User Experience area lead for checkout and payments, which processed over 700 million transactions annually.
Armed with the belief that a simple, transparent and well-designed product would establish trust with users I identified 3 key design guidelines:
• Each page should have a clear purpose and add value to the experience.
• The design should feel so natural for users that it would require no learning.
• Every element of the page should help users focus on completing that step of the flow.
The result of the redesigned eBay checkout was a 10% increase in user satisfaction and a 17% increase in ease of use making it eBay’s top-rated flow.
In order to streamline the experience further, I designed and implemented a guest checkout system for eBay’s new users to buy a fixed price item without requiring them to register for an account. I also launched an incentive redemption interface for eBay gift cards, coupons and gift certificates. Additionally, I proposed, designed and brought to incubation a shopping cart system for eBay.
During that time I coordinated and led cross-organizational initiatives with PayPal, Bill Me Later and Microsoft (Bing). Finally, I managed project timelines and deliverables with global product managers and development teams in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, India and across the United States.
After successfully recreating eBay checkout I moved to the Shipping team where we completely transformed the way shipping worked at eBay, ultimately enabling sellers to provide specific delivery dates upfront in their product listings. In order to accomplish this I redesigned the seller shipping tools and performed a complete overhaul of purchasing and printing shipping labels. Within a few months of launch, label printing doubled to over $1 million per day and customer satisfaction skyrocketed.
2005 — 2005
I was brought into Cisco as a contractor to define the information architecture and develop user interfaces for a multi-part B2B application, spanning multiple departments and reaching thousands of users.
To accomplish this, I worked with stakeholders to translate the needs of business analysts into user interfaces thus achieving business goals while maintaining an optimal user experience. After identifying and categorizing the requirements I produced wireframes that were tested with the users and finally designed the interfaces.
One personal goal was to design for scalability so I established a set of templates to be used for all page development. I collaborated closely with the engineers and performed regular code reviews to ensure it would seamlessly be integrated into the development environment for rapid implementation. The result was a set of clear usability and interface standards to be used across all Cisco B2B applications.
Education
John F. Kennedy University
Master's degree
Sonoma State University